The Next Wave of E-Government: The
Challenges of Data Architectureby Charles H. Kaylor

Charles H. Kaylor is with Public Sphere Information
Group,
P.O. Box 600434
,
Newtonville
,
MA
02460
; he can be reached by email at ckaylor@psigroup.biz

There can be no doubt about it:
local e-government efforts are starting to mature. Given the
dramatic increase in the flexibility and affordability of
Web-based technologies, more and more municipal and county
governments across the nation are realizing the benefits of
Web-enabled applications. Data outlined below suggest that, in
large part, the newest trends in e-government evolution will
squarely target the ability of local governments to think
flexibly and creatively about data integration. Taking advantage
of these opportunities will also require increased
organizational and management capacity. This paper describes the
evolution of e-government across the nation’s largest cities,
assesses trends in service delivery and considers some of the
implications of these changes for all local governments.

In
recent years, advances in technology, particularly the advent of
the Internet and the World Wide Web, have led to a dramatic
change in how local governments construe their service delivery
obligations. As the data described below demonstrate, a sea
change is occurring as these applications evolve. What separates
the leading edge from the rest is increasingly defined by
sophisticated back-end integration of data – geographic
information systems (GIS), constituency relationship management
(CRM), document management and content management. New and
proliferating information and communications technologies seem
to promise broader information dissemination and new modes of
service delivery. All local governments face significant
challenges in the next stages of e-government, but smaller
governments, in particular, are increasingly left behind by
these developments. A substantial challenge remains in finding
feasible and sustainable approaches to providing information and
services to the public in an era of data integration.

When
local governments first began to use the Web for information and
service delivery, they tended to make ad
hoc decisions. Individual bureaus would often develop their
websites without coordinating across the organization. The
result was that early municipal website development tended to be
a cobble of ponderously organized, difficult to find information
with very little interactivity or consideration for their
audience.

The
Municipality e-Government Assessment Project (MeGAP) had its
origin in 2000 as an effort to provide a comprehensive
compendium and benchmark of municipal experiments in the
provision of Web-based services. The MeGAP assessment of local
governments and the data it generates are designed, collected
and maintained by the Public Sphere Information Group,
Newtonville, MA (www.psigroup.biz/megap).
The strategy for the development of this methodology was to
focus on information that would be of use to e-government
implementers, creating an overview of what other local
governments had done to inform their own decision-making. This
approach is deliberately in tension with a number of rubrics for
evaluating services that were available at the time of its
development.

When
this study was initially devised, there were already several
efforts at evaluating (and developing metrics for evaluating)
the success of websites provided by local (Kanfer & Kolar,
Johnson & Misic, Stowers), state and federal (West,
Eschenfelder) governments. These studies had a common approach
– create an evaluative rubric for already existing efforts
with an eye toward improving implemented services and offering
best practices advice for prospective services. What none of
them provides, however, is concrete advice on specific
strategies and applications (that is, which cities had provided
which types of Web-based services and which services were most
common). As a result there were no reliable assessments of the
state of municipal e-government.

Contemporaneously
with the evolution of the MeGAP as a benchmark of e-government,
several organizations and researchers began publishing rankings
of websites. Most notably, Darrell West’s “Urban
E-Government, 2004” provides one of the more comprehensive
assessments of the state of municipal government efforts,
providing “a detailed analysis of 1,873 city government sites
in the 70 largest metropolitan areas” in the United States.
Also private organizations such as the Center for Digital
Government announces its “Best of the Web” rankings for
municipal, county and state governments, based on its annual
survey. Unlike all of these studies, however, in addition to
devising a rating system based on the composite eScore, the
MeGAP also provides a fine-grained analysis of particular
functions and services that cities have characteristically
provided for generations combined with those functions that are
the hallmark of the information age. The relatively
straightforward method for gathering these data begins with an
observational study of official municipal websites. Each website
is assessed across a wide range of performance dimensions that
fall into four categories:

§information dissemination (online presence)

§registration, permits & GIS (interactive functions)

§eCommerce (transactional functions)

§eDemocracy (tranformative functions)

The
MeGAP uses a four-point system to assess the degree of
implementation of the 75 performance dimensions under these
general categories. Points are awarded for each dimension based
on the degree of interactivity of that Web-enabled feature as
follows: one point if information on a given subject exists; two
points if contact information exists for the relevant
responsible party; three points if documents and forms exist in
a downloadable format; and four points if the transaction of
information and data can take place completely online. The study
focuses, then, on observing the degree of interactivity across a
range of performance dimensions. The approach only assesses
those services that are accessible to an outsider visiting a
municipal government’s official website, measuring the
existence of and level of sophistication of services and
providing a summary “eScore.”

Findings

The
overall finding of this assessment of the largest U.S. cities is
that a tremendous amount of progress has been made. For example,
from the first MeGAP observations (Wave I) in 2000-2001 to the
latest effort (Wave III) in 2004, the increase in the
availability, interactivity and quality of Web-based municipal
services is stunning. As Figure 1 shows, among cities over
500,000, eScores improved impressively over time. In part, this
improvement has to do with several changes in the assessment
instrument itself, primarily the inclusion of several new
performance dimensions that pertain to particular information
and services, such as information on education, community
services, housing, vital records and public health. That caveat
aside, controlling for new dimensions, eScores improved among
all cities at each wave of observation.

When
the first data using what evolved into the MeGAP methodology
were gathered in 2000, interactive functions and features were
far less common. In fact, in the first wave of observations,
only 36 of the 141 U.S. cities with populations between 100,000
and 200,000 allowed any interactive access to city hall beyond
offering a generic email address or other minimal contact. Among
all cities with official websites, a distinct minority offered
interactive access to services and functions (Kaylor, Deshazo
& Van Eck). Only about one third of U.S. cities over 100,000
offered downloadable documents. The standard in 2000 was basic
informational services.

A
more reliable measure of the improvements at municipal websites
in general involves the provision of interactive services. The
overall eScores suggest that local governments are broadening
the range of services and functions to which they provide
access. Without exception, all cities with populations over
100,000 provide access to more and more information. More
importantly, however, municipalities are improving the ease of
use of these features by offering an increasing number of
interactive services online (see Figure 2). Interestingly, the
most common interactive feature at municipal sites is the online
action request. The term of art for these features, generally,
is customer relationship management (CRM) tools, which borrows
from the private sector – although often the acronym is
amended in the public sector context to “constituent” or
“citizen.” In the most recent wave of observations, over
three quarters of the governments of cities with populations
over 300,000 allow online submission of service requests or
complaints – anything from potholes or burned-out streetlights
to code and nuisance violations.

Other
interactive features have also proliferated since the 2001 wave
of observations. The top 10 leaders in eScores in Wave I had
from eight to 10 functions that could take place entirely
online. Today, the top 10 cities allow from 16 to 20. The
spreading ease of use reaches across a panoply of city functions
– to include building and licensing, utilities payments,
assessments, procurement, planning and GIS. Over the period of
the three waves of assessment, an increasing number of large
local governments provide these interactive and transactive
features on line. Beyond those displayed in Figure 2, all
municipal governments of large U.S. cities have increased their
interactivity remarkably in the last several years.

More
telling is the trajectory that separates cities with higher
eScores from the rest. At the first wave of observations in
2001, even among cities over 100,000, relatively few offered
more than basic information dissemination. Only a small minority
(29%) provided online interactive GIS; even fewer (24%) offered
online constituency relationship management (CRM); fewer still
offered online payments (6%). Today these features are the
mainstays of Web-based services among larger municipalities with
77% of the largest cities in the country providing some sort of
interactive access to action request and complaint systems,
although fewer have implemented fully functional CRM systems.
Over 60% have data-rich, highly interactive GIS features. Over
half provide the means for online payments of fines or fees. The
trend is clear: the current state of the art in electronic
government is toward features and functions that demand complex
and comprehensive data integration. Cities that characterize the
leading edge of innovation have, through a combination of
technological implementation and organizational change,
developed the capacity to synthesize and deliver staggering
amounts of data to the public.

While
the leading edge demonstrates an enormous opportunity to provide
better information and services to the publics they serve, one
concomitant trend must be noted. A huge gap exists between these
largest communities and smaller and more rural areas. Regional
studies using the MeGAP methodology show that, even in
metropolitan areas, a large divide exists between “haves”
and “have-nots.” For example, a 2001 study of metropolitan
St. Louis showed that only 36% of the region’s local
governments had official websites at all. This translates into
roughly 30% of the population living in municipalities that
offer no online services. Similarly, a study of the entire
states of Massachusetts (2002) and Kentucky (2003) using the
MeGAP methodology show that significant portions of the
populations are nowhere near the leading edge described in this
article; indeed, their communities lack official Web presence
altogether.

Challenges of the Next Wave of E-Government

Utopians
at the advent of the availability of Web-based services hoped
for a transformation in the ways that citizens engage their
governments. Many continue to hold out hope for
technology-enabled democratic decision-making. This study of
large U.S. cities suggests that, to date, such hope is in vain.
No doubt there are many reasons that new modes of engaging
citizens are not being developed at city websites.

Data-rich features
characterize the leading edge.Given that investment decisions in information technology are
made in an environment of fierce competition for increasingly
scarce resources, implementation of all Web-based services
amounts to triage. Increasingly, large U.S. cities are turning
toward business modeling to determine which services and
features to invest in. This change in emphasis means that
technologies that can be shown to increase efficiency or
decrease costs are given priority. Without question, the
technologies that are proving themselves using such metrics are
those that integrate existing data and thereby locate ways of
redeeming existing expenditures. Data gathered pursuant to some
previously stove-piped function within city governments is now
increasingly linked with other data, providing new services and
enriched information to constituents.

A
fine example of this trend is in the proliferating use of GIS
across city departments. In previous years, GIS tended to be
subsumed within a particular department’s Web page – more
often than not planning or public works. Increasingly, however,
local governments are incorporating GIS functionality broadly.
For example, Charlotte-Mecklenburg links GIS to the voter
registration database, allowing site visitors to locate polling
places, wards and other election information linked to
geography. Los Angeles is among several cities that have
integrated GIS with their locations-based services. From a
single site, constituents can find out about the location of
schools, fire departments, street maintenance operations and
police stations, based on their locations. San Diego is one of
several cities that have linked GIS functionality with CRM,
meaning that a site visitor can make an action request by
specifying the location of, say, a pothole on a street map.

Specific applications point
to the need for continued technological and managerial change.
To be sure, the increase in easily accessible information
provided by local governments has the demonstrably positive
benefits of improving constituent satisfaction, improving
performance and empowering citizens. Indeed, the better cities
provide such information, the less city staff is burdened by
having to answer telephones, respond to email and interface with
the public visiting city hall. The challenge, of course,
transcends technology. While it is clear that the technological
capacities of leading edge cities far outpace those of their
smaller peers, the real change has been in the culture of city
government, a change that has yet to settle into smaller
jurisdictions. The current generation of e-government evolution
requires flexible technology management as never before. Indeed,
the latest round of applications requires new approaches to
stimulate creative thinking regarding existing stores of data,
approaches that will locate valuable and useful data and link it
functionally across departments. As Ellen Perlman recently wrote
in Governing, “Rather than trying to force all data into one big
compatible base, the idea is to tap into existing databases for
the bits and pieces of information – and integrate them for a
specific use.” This goal is one that requires the continued
integration of best practices in IT management into local
governments. Naturally, localities with large IT staffs and
professionally trained management will continue to lead.

The digital divide between
advanced local governments and the rest continues to grow apace.

Finally, the MeGAP shows clearly
that smaller, more rural communities are being left farther and
farther behind. On one hand, this is a distressing trend.
Analyzing the geography of local government in Michigan, for
example, we see the concrete effects (Figure 3). Michigan is
hardly alone in having large swaths of smaller, rural
jurisdictions that completely lack official Web presences. The
challenges of implementing cutting-edge applications for these
communities seem a distant and unlikely concern. That said,
increasingly, local government implementation of technology is
associated with economic development and competitiveness.

The
challenges confronting these smaller jurisdictions are manifold.
There are nonetheless, perhaps, advantages to lagging. Several
best practices are emerging that smaller jurisdictions can
benefit from. For example, many city governments put enormous
resources into Web-enabling their services and functions at the
onset of the e-government revolution only to find that they need
to reinvest in content management systems in order to keep
information up-to-date. Smaller governments just now turning to
Web-enabled applications are implementing content management
systems at the outset. More crucially, perhaps in the long run
there are advantages to lagging today. The emerging best
practices of data integration and organizational change can
certainly inform what these smaller communities do next. The
task is to develop models for implementation that are sound,
sustainable and appropriate.

Perlman, E.
(2004 September). Dealing in data: Forget about building a big
all-purpose database. There are other ways to integrate state
and local information. Governing.
(Retrieved October 18, 2004 from www.governing.com/articles/9egdata.htm).

Stowers, G. N.
L. (1999). Becoming cyberactive: State and local governments on
the World Wide Web.” Government
Information Quarterly,16,
111-127.

Elements
of this analysis were presented by the author in a paper
entitled “The State of eGovernment in the US: Benchmarking the
Progress of Localities” at the “E-governance: Creating
On-line Citizen Participation Tools” conference at Ohio State
University, March 4-6, 2004.